Monday, April 11, 2011

Two Cities

Went on a trip last weekend! But first:
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
This is a terremoto. Or at least, the remains of one. Terremoto means "earthquake" in Spanish, and you all can surmise why that is. The ingredients: a fortified white wine called Viña Pipeño, a generous splash of grape brandy called chicha, and a scoop of pineapple ice cream.

They said it only takes one. I said: challenge accepted. As far as I was concerned, it did not only take one; however, I cannot in good conscience recommend having more than two.

Zetes (and anyone else on for 11X) can look forward to these in the summer.

Anyway, I headed out to Valparaiso on Saturday with Dustin, one of the other volunteers at Coanil. Valparaiso is a port city right on the Pacific Ocean, and the sandy beaches of Viña del Mar are just a stone's throw away. Unfortunately, we went on the only two overcast days that we've had so far in Chile. Stupid weather.

Not to say it wasn't pretty, but these pictures are going to make the place look extremely glum. I promise Valparaiso is extremely awesome and you should all go if you are ever in Chile:

Not pictured: the idyllic beauty of Valparaiso
Valparaiso is built on some hills. When I say on the hills, I mean ON them. This city makes no sense at all. It defies gravity, and by that I mean struggles constantly against it. The city has no organization, no order. The buildings are of all shapes and colors and heights and the whole place is a complete mess.

Again, I thought the backdrop would be prettier at the time
In other words, I loved it. I like my cities messy.

I also can't stress how awesome it was to smell ocean after all this time in the city. I think I'm going to have to live on the coast whenever I settle down.

Took an hour and a half to find our hostel. Not exaggerating. That city is so confusing. We were so close at first, too, but we wandered off on a wild goose chase for no apparent reason. Ah well.

The hostel's owner was named Jorge. He told us where to go in town, and we followed his advice to a T. First stop: this restaurant in the docks district called Punta Linta. They served us pisco sours and local beer - I got one from Patagonia, which is down south - and one of the best seafood meals that I've had in a while. They mixed up all these different seafoods. Clams, mussels, shrimp, fish, even some sort of red-colored mollusk that I had never seen before. Added lemon and greens and some sauce. It was fantastic and more importantly utterly filling. I haven't been that full in a really long time.

Also, the man knew how to tend a garden
We next followed Jorge's directions to the house of Pablo Neruda, famous Chilean poet. It took us a while to get there too; as I said, the city is very hilly and there is no sensical layout. We ended up enlisting the help of an eight-year-old Chilean kid named Tomas to bring us to the right place.

Pablo Neruda is dead now, but his house is still there, commemorated in museum form. I am really glad we went. The house was extremely cool. Five stories high and narrow, but with space for anything and everything you could ever want. A welcoming floor. Floor for the kids' rooms. Third floor is a dining room, a party room, a bar. Fourth floor for the bedroom. Fifth floor with the coolest study you could ever ask for, with a view right over the city and tons of old maps and handwritten poetry and and paintings.

Did you know he had a signature drink? Champagne, cognac, cointreau, and orange juice. I'm bringing this back to Dartmouth and serving it right next to the terremotos.

The view from Neruda's study.
I want Pablo Neruda's house. It is so cool. And he was a really cool dude, too. I would have bought a book of his poetry right there but all the ones with both Spanish and English translations were way too expensive. I'll get one around here or back in the states. Seems more economical that way.

A few last pictures from Valparaiso:

Valparaiso at night - see, I told you it was pretty
Cool graffiti
More cool graffiti
In the morning we headed out to Viña del Mar. It was still pretty overcast but it was for sure nicer than on Saturday. We first headed to these awesome botanical gardens. So nice to see all that green.
Pictured: the biggest tree I've seen in a while

Viña del Mar is a much more typical beach city than Valparaiso. High rises along the beach, pretty scenery, shops everywhere. It actually reminded me a ton of Old Orchard Beach back in Maine, except it was a lot bigger and probably a lot nicer. People from Maine will get what I'm talking about, and if you aren't from Maine, OOB is one among many reasons to visit.

Enough about Maine. After we toured the botanical gardens we stopped at this fantastic empanada restaurant. An empanada is like a calzone but butterier and more delicious. Mine had chorizo sausage in it, which was a good call. They also served the best hot chocolate I've ever had. I'm convinced they melted down the chocolate specifically for me to drink at that exact moment.

We saw this cool salsa band out front of a restaurant as we walked from the restaurant to the beach:
The lead trumpet was hitting high-high Gs. Ridiculous.
The beaches of Viña, from rocky to sandy
We essentially relaxed on the beach for maybe three hours. I decided to take a dip in the Pacific because I wasn't going to get this close to the Pacific Ocean and not go in. I don't regret this decision, but I also don't regret the decision to get out almost immediately. I forgot that the Humboldt current brings up a TON of freezing-cold water to the coast, so the water was almost as cold as in Maine. With weather that dreary I was unable to handle it. Also, the tide was breaking really hard, so even if I had gone body surfing like I wanted to I would have eaten a lot of sand.

A few more pictures from Viña:

Some sand art

Epic pelican
Viña del Mar, everyone.
Work has been better lately. It is nice to get settled into a single classroom and get to know particular kids. They may not all be able to speak to me but that doesn't mean they don't have something to say. It's hard to tell at first but each of the kids I work with has a very distinct personality.

One girl, Carmen, likes me a lot. She likes the texture of my watch. It's very smooth and cool. I don't think she gets to feel anything like that very often. But besides that, she always gets this huge smile when I walk into the room, though, like she is excited to see me. 

One of my other favorites in the classroom is Mary, who is always smiling but not super loud. Pleasant. Can feed herself. She can even speak a little, which is awesome. A nice girl.

I am gaining more responsibilities. I helped feed one kid today. His name is Carlos and he is one of the kids who is the most out of it in my classroom. He only seems to pay attention when he hears his name or when food is in front of him, as though he is acting more out of reflex than out of conscious thought. One of the nurses says he has to take a lot of drugs because he has spasms and seizures a lot. It makes me sad because I want to see something - anything - going on with this kid.

I didn't have a lot of hope for this to happen, but today I saw him really pay attention to something for the first time since I got to Coanil.

One of my favorite things in the classroom is the guitar. The tías let me play during the downtime between class and lunch, and also once we're done cleaning things up after lunch before the kids go back to their rooms. I don't have any instruments of my own to play here and I don't get to sing with the Cords (or anyone else, for that matter) while I'm in Chile, so having ANY music in my life is really nice.

I had played for the kids before. This was not the first time I had done this. I wasn't even singing along today, I was just practicing the chords to some songs I wanted to learn better. Maybe it was because I fed him and then played, I don't know. But Carlos was really feeling it. He was touching me, touching the guitar, making eye contact, making noises.

This near-catatonic kid was actually interacting with me.

I'm sure this sounds cheesy. But in a place where I don't get to see much change or progress with the patients I work with, things like this mean a lot. Seeing that change in Carlos, even though it was very brief, reminds me that everything I do here matters. Even dumb stuff like playing guitar, stuff that has nothing to do with medicine or physical therapy or the things that I came here to learn.

I'm starting to think this trip to Chile isn't really about that, though. I'm starting to think this journey is about learning something completely different.

Spanish Word of the Day: Gringo. Depending on the connotation, this word either means "foreigner" or "f%#$ing foreigner."

Next Time on 11Santiago: Probably going to be a little while until I update again, so I'm not quite sure. More on the work situation. Maybe I'll head over to Argentina in a couple of weeks? Regardless, there is still a lot in store.

-Adam

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Not In Kansas Anymore

Let's get this thing started. This is the view from my apartment window:
Hells yes.
Santiago is an awesome city unlike anywhere I've ever been before. One great part is how it's been 85º and sunny every day so far (can't complain) but there's so much more to Santiago than that. The people are extremely friendly and don't mind helping some random foreigner who can't speak much Spanish get around. There are endless attractions and parks and green things. I think my favorite part, though, is the dichotomy of the city. I think this picture (which I didn't take) illustrates it nicely:
Plaza de Armas, Santiago



Plaza de Armas is the literal and cultural center of Santiago. Local legend has it (meaning, Chilean history establishes) that Don Pedro de Valdivia hiked up Cerro de Santa Lucia, one of the many tall hills in the city, pointed to the area where Plaza de Armas would eventually be, and said, "This is where Santiago will be." And yet, you can see the huge skyscraper standing right behind these four- and five-hundred-year-old buildings. The mix of the old isolationism of Chile's past and the modern globalization of Chile's present and future is an interesting dichotomy that I expect to manifest itself throughout my trip.

So what am I doing in Chile, exactly? I found this extremely cool internship through Experience Learning International, which is an awesome non-profit organization with all kinds of cool internships and volunteer opportunities all around the world. I applied to do a medical internship here in Santiago and they gave me the opportunity to do so with a non-profit called Fundación Coanil.

Coanil serves the physically and mentally disabled population of Chile in two ways. First, it teaches and gives job skills to the disabled who are able to work and provide for their families. Second, it takes care of and gives a home to the disabled who are too disabled to work. They are a fantastic foundation with centers in every corner of Chile and I am very lucky to be working with them.

Here is the specific place that I work:
This particular Coanil building is in the La Reina neighborhood just outside Santiago, about a half-hour commute from my apartment in Providencia. This particular center houses people who are too disabled to work. All but one of these people are wheelchair-bound. Many of them are unable to use their hands, speak, or even control their bodies in a basic way. All of them have physical deformities. Most of them have mental disabilities.

In short, I'm glad to be working with a population that genuinely needs help.

My day-to-day job is not yet completely established. So far I have helped in classrooms, helped feed people, worked on art projects, and assisted with physical therapy and kinesiology. I expect to do some work in the infirmary and the ICU at some point as well. The more variety I get in what I do day-to-day, the happier I will be at this job. I'm sure I will have more updates about this the next time that I work.

Everyone at the Coanil center is extremely nice. My fellow American volunteers rock, and the local staff is friendly and easy to work with. Chilean Spanish is fast-paced and has a thick accent, but everyone is happy to slow down and speak more clearly if I ask them to. My Spanish is coming along much faster than I expected it to, by the way, and I am already understanding a large amount of what is going on around me.

Also, the center is in the beautiful Santiagüino suburbs. Check this out.

The Andes. This is the view from outside the Coanil center. Outrageous, eh?
Though I am grateful to have an opportunity like this, I would be lying if I said it was easy to do. Far beyond the language barrier, the heat, and the hours, the most difficult part of this job is the utter lack of progress that the people I am working with make. 

It is hard to teach a curriculum to someone who cannot control her hands. It is hard to help a person draw parts of the human body if he cannot see.

I knew that coming to work at this job with developmentally disabled people would take a lot of patience. I did not understand that this job would require more than that. Working at Coanil means understanding that your patients probably will not make any progress at all. Every single person at this Coanil center will spend their life there, interrupted only by occasional field trips to exotic places like the park and the beach. Volunteers, interns, and employees will come and go, and the patience will enjoy their presence in that moment, but when those volunteers and interns and employees leave they will not know for better or worse.

All of the work I am proudest of in my life has had a lasting impact on others. The idea that my work here will almost certainly have little to no lasting impact no matter what I do is a hard pill to swallow.

This is not to say that my work here is without purpose or meaning. I think it is intrinsically good to make all of these people as happy as possible, whether that is through teaching, art, physical therapy, or medicine. All people, developmentally disabled or not, deserve a happy life, and I think that being part of that is worth doing, even if these people will not remember my name, my face, or even my existence as soon as I leave Chile. Or even as soon as I leave the room.

Sorry for getting all somber on everyone. Here's another picture from my apartment window:
Awwwwww yeahhhhhhhhh
That hill over there is Cerro San Cristobal. I'm going to hike it sometime soon with some of the other Coanil volunteers, all of whom are extremely awesome and fun.

Today we went to La Vega, which is this huge market in the center of Santiago. Like many things, it stands out as old-fashioned in a modern city. To get there, you have to cross what my Fodor's Guide to Chile referred to as "the majestic Mapocho River."

I'm calling bullshit on "majestic." Actually, I'm calling bullshit on "river."
La Vega is extremely cool. They sell all sorts of fruits and vegetables at extremely good prices.
I didn't take this picture either. So sue me.
I bought two pounds of grapes, two pounds of bananas, a half-gallon of raspberries, six apples, and ten bread biscuits. It cost me about five dollars. Awesome. I am having a feast for breakfast tomorrow.

Afterwards we went to Bella Vista for drinks. Happy "hour" lasts from 12 P.M. to 9 P.M. here (it goes as late as midnight at some places, apparently). Anyone who visits Santiago should try a pisco sour, which is made with their national liquor, a sort of grape brandy. Some people like it and some people don't. I thought it was pretty tasty myself.

It strikes me that I have just barely gotten my feet wet in this city. I am all moved into my apartment, I have started my work, I have met my friends through the Coanil program, but there is still so much to do, so much to explore.

I personally can't wait.

Spanish Word of the Day: Taco. In Mexico this means a delicious meal. In Chile it means a traffic jam. Son tacos where there is a lot of traffic on the road, like during rush hour (7 to 8 PM).

Next Time On "11Santiago": Terremotos, a weekend trip to Valparaiso, more updates on my life and the times

-Adam